Greasy, stoned and grovelling: The band Radiohead modelled themselves on
When Radiohead started out, they weren’t exactly a bad band, but there was nothing remarkable about them. Their earliest demos, when they played under the name On A Friday, showed some potential, and then their debut album, under the name they’re best known as now, the much-maligned Pablo Honey, boasted a couple of standout singles in ‘Creep’ and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’.
It’s probably safe to say that nobody expected this scrappy indie rock band to go on to create multiple genre and era-defining records.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having humble beginnings and then developing with time into something far more expansive, but you have to wonder where the inspiration to go from Pablo Honey to The Bends and then OK Computer in the span of only five years came from. As the principal songwriter, Thom Yorke began expanding his own musical horizons significantly after the release of the debut, and started listening to much more progressive music, and even developed an infatuation with electronic music by the time they were on their third and fourth records.
However, it wasn’t just Yorke who was directing the band towards new and exciting sounds for them to channel. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also responsible for introducing some of the elements that would go on to help define the band’s sound as they progressed through their career, especially when it came to adding orchestral flourishes to the band’s output.
Despite this, it was his insistence that the band ought to listen to one particular band from decades prior as a point of influence and inspiration that truly gave them the grounding to grow from being a run-of-the-mill indie rock outfit into a prog rock-adjacent beast that knew exactly how to make their songs more elaborate. The band that few expected to amount to anything took one listen to a classic rock band from years before, and suddenly found the recipe for creating masterpieces of their own.
During the 1990s, Greenwood became obsessed with Pink Floyd, and supposedly gathered the rest of the band in a room together to make them study their most legendary live performance and learn how exactly things should be done. According to Greenwood’s brother, bassist Colin Greenwood, Jonny’s obsession with the recording would help form the band’s later identity to a great extent, although some of the points of interest he picked up on and distinctly recalls were not necessarily related to the music at all.
“Jonny made us all watch Pink Floyd: Live At Pompeii, and said: ‘Now this is how we should do videos,’” he recalled of the instance where the band laid their eyes upon the live show. “I remember seeing Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar, and Roger Waters with long greasy hair and dusty flares.”
While he would later go on to make mention of the gong that Waters thumps with “his big beater”, something that the band have never utilised, there are plenty of similarities between this era of Pink Floyd’s musical development and where Radiohead would end up by the end of their first decade.
While Radiohead did eventually move away from sounding like the progressive rock giants on later releases, it’s clear that their influence rubbed off on them to a degree while they were working on their definitive releases in the 1990s, and their brave ventures into other genre territories could possibly have stemmed from Pink Floyd’s fearlessness in doing the same.
